Poem 29 - The Novel That Asks to Erase Itself

[me]

The Novel That Asks to Erase Itself – Albert Goldbarth

But perhaps that couple sitting in the corner booth
in silence isn’t working out some bitterness

in what got said, but working on not saying it:
a sturdy and impressive Taj Mahalian construction

that we’ll never see, which of course
is the point – as if inventing anti-matter

or zero: something immeasurably important
although beyond our witnessing senses. They might be

the lesson of Frankenstein, incarnate
In this neighborhood pub. The genius wasn’t
 
in making the monster; and certainly not
in killing it; but would have been, 

invisibly, in not making it to begin with.